Harney looks disgusted as she steps through the front door. The duplex is rented by Edie Labarriere, a single mother and Harney's best friend, who lived here with her two sons, ages 12 and 9, before Katrina. Since the hurricane, the family has been living with Harney at her house in Harahan, La. Just now, the Labarrieres are on their way here to salvage what's left of their things.

From the outside, the duplex doesn't look too bad. A yellow X is spraypainted on each of the two front windows, indicating that it's been checked out by search-and-rescue. The number 0 on both X's indicate that no one's been found, dead or alive.

Inside, three wooden kitchen chairs are lodged at crazy angles. They are stuck in a tar pit of thick, black, rancid goo, which is peppered with random household items: a clothes hanger, stray pieces of paper, and what was once a maroon raincoat. There's nowhere to step that isn't black mire, which holds everything within its oily grasp.

In the backyard, the children's bikes sit encrusted in filth. "I guess we won't have to take their bicycles home," she sighs. A hammock, ripped from its tree, lies plastered to the backyard fence, which now leans into the neighbor's yard. Near the back door, the muck on the ground grows smoky gray, then a sickly green. "Ewww," she says. "I gotta go in there, people. God, this stuff stinks. Am I a good friend or am I a good friend?"

Soon after Katrina, St. Bernard Parish president Henry Rodriguez dubbed the area "another Love Canal." A few weeks later, says parish spokesman Steve Cannizaro, Rodriguez consulted with the EPA, "and they told us the area was not toxic, and we decided everyone has a right to see their home, and so we let them back in."

Many citizens and activists in St. Bernard Parish, also home to a ExxonMobil refinery, wanted to return home but didn't trust the EPA. In late September, 180 residents of the parish met at a Holiday Inn in Baton Rouge, seeking information about pollution in their neighborhood. Everyone was full of questions: "What is EPA doing?" "How big was the spill?" "What is Murphy going to do?" In fact, St. Bernard residents are so suspicious of the local oil companies that over a year ago they persuaded the parish to hire an independent environmental engineer.

But today, says Kenneth Ford, president of St. Bernard Citizens for Environmental Quality, the engineer is nowhere to be found. "We're disappointed," says Ford. "Without his scientific proof that the parish is not contaminated, no one should be allowed in right now."

Cannizaro replies that the parish is comfortable with the EPA's advice to allow people to return. What's more, he says, the parish of 68,000 residents "is one step away from being financially destroyed; businesses are flat on their ass." People need to return and start buying and building again. "You can't operate a government without taxes," he says.

Canvassing the parish in late September is a four-man crew from Greenpeace. They have spent weeks living in a Cruise America R.V. with an aluminum boat strapped on top, documenting the environmental destruction on the Gulf Coast. They have taped the letters "TV" on the windshield of their Jeep to make passing military and police security checkpoints easier. In weeks of surveying the damage from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Greenpeace guys attest that they've seen some hideous sights, like an offshore oil rig in the Gulf that's been ripped from its moorings and turned upside down, leaving a five-mile-long oil slick in its wake.

John Hocevar, a marine biologist for Greenpeace, says that 40 percent of the coastal wetlands in Mississippi have been so damaged they're no longer able to perform their ecological function as a natural water filter and habitat to birds and wildlife. In Port Arthur, Texas, they saw a refinery so damaged by Hurricane Rita that two of its storage tanks had imploded. But the neighborhood surrounding Murphy Oil is by far the worst that they've encountered.

"This community could have rebuilt but Murphy Oil killed it," says Mark Floegel, a toxics campaigner for Greenpeace. "It would have been bad. But the oil spill makes it so much worse."

Currently, the company is working with the Coast Guard and the EPA to mop up the spill. Dump trucks, steam shovels and hydraulic pumps scoop up contaminated soil around the tank and pump the oil into tankers. The workmen are dressed in heavy boots and yellow hazard pants. One tells the Greenpeace crew flatly: "Nobody here is going to answer any of your questions."

The Murphy spill was such a direct hit to the neighborhood that the company is already facing two class-action lawsuits brought by lawyers on behalf of St. Bernard residents. Another suit is being brought by the owners of the Paris Palms Shopping Center in Chalmette for the damages it suffered. In response, Murphy has announced that it will give $5 million to hurricane relief to the area through the United Way, the local school system and the parish itself.

The oil spill is clearly the final indignity after a brutal storm. But environmentalists fear that the real story isn't getting out.

"So far, from what we've seen, we don't really have any reason to believe that what we're being told is really the whole story," says Hocevar. "If you don't look, there's nothing to see," he continues. "We have an administration that has been cutting back on the EPA investigative enforcement." According to a 2004 report by the Environmental Integrity Project, the number of civil lawsuits filed by the federal government under the Bush administration dropped 75 percent from the number in the last three years of the Clinton reign. Eric Schaeffer, the former head of the EPA enforcement office, who oversaw the project, told the Los Angeles Times, "If you're a big energy company, you're basically on holiday from enforcement."

Greenpeace isn't conducting independent testing of the air or groundwater, but other groups are. Under normal circumstances, a small nonprofit, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, distributes air-sampling kits to residents who live near refineries and petrochemical plants so that they can independently monitor what's being spewed into the air around them. But post-Katrina, the group sent a professional sampling team from Dynamac Corp. into St. Bernard Parish to take 10 soil samples. The results are due soon. NRDC also plans to work with local environmental groups to conduct a battery of independent tests.

Senate Republicans, led by Environment and Public Works Committee chairman James Inhofe -- who has declared that global warming is a hoax -- have introduced a bill that would allow EPA to waive clean water and air laws during the cleanup. The EPA itself is drafting a plan that would allow the agency to waive state regulations on smog emissions or pollutants pouring out of coal plants. In response, Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said: "It's bad enough that big polluters want to exploit the tragedy to pollute more, but it's even worse that Washington Republicans want to help them do it."

A draft for the EPA plan states that for the agency to act there must be "an Act of God or another event that could not have reasonably been foreseen or prevented." "They call it an act of God," says Malek-Wiley of Louisiana's Sierra Club. "But I was just in St. Bernard Parish and it was heartbreaking to see that people's lives are now coated with a film of oil from Murphy. God didn't put the oil tanks in those people's backyards."

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